Spring's Roo reaches version 1.0

Following the major releases of the Spring framework, the Groovy scripting language and Grails, the SpringSource release train has now delivered the new version of the Roo rapid application development tool. Introduced in spring 2009, Roo is a command line-based Java application tool designed to radically simplify the development of Spring web applications. It uses a mix of passive and active code generators to create .xml or .java files and is also able to dynamically update .aj and .jsp files. The code-generation technology has now managed the jump to version 1.0.

The Roo shell offers a context-sensitive help feature and can auto-complete text inputs. It also generates and maintains all the required project fragments and configuration files. A plus for Java developers is that, unlike similar technologies such as JRuby or Groovy, Roo doesn't require mastering a different language as it works with Java language and its standard libraries. By moving all the developer assistance to development time, Roo has no runtime library to increase the size of deployed applications. The developers also highlight that there is no lock-in with Roo; they say it can be removed from a project in under ten minutes. A presentation on Roo features is available. Roo is licensed under the GPLv3 and is available to download from the SpringSource community site.

(djwm)